


Convergence

by oceansinmychest



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Affection, F/F, Fluff, Massage, One Shot, Pining, Purple Prose, it's about the yearning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:28:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27592736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oceansinmychest/pseuds/oceansinmychest
Summary: In which Captain Janeway pays worship to Seven on Nine by applying lotion to those long, shapely legs
Relationships: Kathryn Janeway/Seven of Nine
Comments: 8
Kudos: 30





	Convergence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KathyIsWeird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KathyIsWeird/gifts).



> As a disclaimer, this is my first ever time watching Voyager, Star Trek in general, and writing J/7. I found their dynamic so enthralling and compelling on screen. 
> 
> This is a super late birthday gift for my friend, KathyisWeird. Thank you for your kindness and support in this fandom. :) 
> 
> Hope y'all enjoy!

Although this is neither a decree for surrender nor the occasion to brandish a white flag, Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Federation Starship, Voyager, kneels before living marble. Command be damned, her gesture expresses – conveys – a nuanced depth. Yet, there’s always an internal struggle. In her private quarters, the Captain lowers herself into a crouching position, not quite on her knees, but on her haunches. Her joints pop, creak, and groan in a muted protest which she stubbornly ignores.

Now, an automaton, rendered a solitary unit, no longer stands.

Seven of Nine, former station Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix One, has come a long way since her severance from the Borg and a subsequent lack of social direction. There is no infinite regress, no buzzing collective of souls whispering in heated tongues while the personalities compete to resurface. In her head, there is silence save for her own rational thought. Like the subtle shift of Daedalus’ statues, she moves.

Is Seven not merely an assimilation, a replication of some dead, human thing?

Without instruction, Seven lowers herself onto the chaise lounge in the center of the Captain’s quarters. Beneath her posterior, the cushions are worn, lightly indented, and clearly lived in. Molded to the Captain’s form as she so often reads her archaic texts, anthologies of poems from dead men and women, unable to sleep. Here, Seven shifts, legs for days engaged in a series of maneuvers befitting for a dance. Her bare feet, bony ankles, rest on the carpet, unmoving. Perhaps even a waltz; swallowing, Kathryn entertains the notion of taking Seven to the holodeck, to Sandrine’s, and offer the tempting proposal of dancing the night away.

Time, she knows, is not limitless as she so often imagines it to be.

Addled by contradiction, Kathryn can and cannot fathom the infinite cycle of lives lived by Seven while in the collective – the assemblage of personalities fused together as some garish, inconceivable, buzzing chimera that once brought her protégé some semblance of peace. Robbed of childhood and individuality has rekindled the road to self-discovery for Seven, but Kathryn still feels the pangs of compassion over the concerns of never quite understanding or knowing how Seven fit into the Hive. Hearing is one thing, experience is another.

Prior to this fated encounter, she replicated a grey button-down for Seven to slip into – a lamentation, or consolation, for her discarded biosuit. At the collar, the buttons remain unfastened to expose the contours of her throat before hiding the rest of her form, the shirt sealed shut like the coffin of desire that Kathryn now pries open. The shirt tails pool over shapely hips; for every subtle motion, the fabric lifts, like a veil, to reveal a hint of navy brief, but oh – it’s the grey, stormy and reminiscent of machinery, that Kathryn admires. Grey suits Seven. Brings out the frosty blue of her eyes, the blonde of her hair, and the pale pallor of her skin, so suitable for the princesses in those fairytales Daddy used to read to little Miss Kate.

“Let me serve you,” Janeway speaks in metaphors in a voice as rough as gravel.

Logic dictates that the Captain wants – no, _needs_ – in this linguistic implication turned physical.

Kneeling, she serves and pays tribute to not a pupil, but a usurper of great expectation. How this woman infuriates and enamors Kathryn remains an archaic mystery. In a case of secular worship, Janeway’s slender hands coast along her shins before venturing up to caress her thighs with a silken touch. The tension riddling her own freckled shoulders and firm clavicle eases up though her tendons and veins protrude from the affliction of steady motion.

Oh, how Seven analyzes her akin to a maddening dataset of haunted code. She tilts her head, expression unreadable in the midst of deliberate observation. Her ocular implant raises as her forehead wrinkles, bestowing the Captain with an inquisitive stare. No other part of her moves as she consents to those delicate, silken caresses. How might she depict the totality of Captain Janeway: as a case study, a pictograph, a bar graph, a line graph? 

“You require this... human connection,” Seven remarks pointedly.

“Yes,” Janeway croaks, her throat suddenly dry. She drops her head, features downcast, before flicking up to meet Seven’s blue, blue eyes.

It’s like drinking in ice cold water.

An affirmative nod follows.

“Proceed.”

Beneath her reverent touch, Seven feels less machine, more human, her existence a quantum paradox. Seven theorizes that the Captain’s need for social contact, for physical contact, is a result of self-deprivation in the name of pariah-like guilt. And Seven lets her do this, lets her feel more human than paragon.

Despite decrees of logic, Seven possesses a bleeding, aching heart. Her ear drums hear a perfectly tuned metronome. She listens to the steady rise and fall of her Captain’s breath, now accelerated – in sync with the bodily reactions Seven of Nine could deduce (even reduce) to clinical terminology, Instead, hushed by such skillful reverence, Seven allows for Janeway to knead her flesh, fingers sinking into skin and muscle to sculpt a forgotten pattern. A delicate rhythm builds.

In the temporary, lulling quietude of trapezing across the Delta Quadrant, Janeway finds no time to pray to any God, or a Q, for that matter.

Laying her hands upon Seven, her fingertips trace constellations and invisible patterns into her skin. She mistakes the blood rushing in her ears for Q’s delighted laughter. Entranced, she encircles the implants, metal protruding against flesh, the circuitry which has wired Seven into who she is in the here and now.

As a rare delight, a subtle sound, Seven’s breath hitches. She’ll take that victory, just as she does in their Velocity tournaments, with a brilliant smile.

In her life-time of assimilated knowledge, Seven finds that crooked, imperfect grin to be far more illuminating than any sun encountered.

Sometimes, Kathryn looks to Seven while regenerating and thinks to herself that she ought not seek forgiveness in another or herself, for that matter. Pride and guilt are always at stubborn odds. In privacy, must they resort to binaries, to static code, to flawed titles? These things go unsaid, in favor of the here and now, despite Seven’s persistent set of challenges. 

“The mere fraction of your hand with respect to the approximation by my tibiofemoral joint serves as an indication of your hesitation.”

Janeway husks out a laugh, as enveloping as tendrils of smoke.

While her post of command looms in the back of her mind, she focuses on the sensation of her weight on the ground, her knees digging into the unkind surface, the rug that masks the skeleton of her ship. In this room resembling a white cube gallery, superimposed by all restraints and relics of an antiquated earth, she reveres a true woman deemed a work of art.

Looking down through the veil of her lashes, Seven is neither a living statue nor is Janeway the steel she likens herself to despite the iron coursing through her pulsing, racing veins. For reasons beyond her analytical comprehension, Janeway traces a figure eight into her skin, but horizontally. A symbol of infinity, unspoken, yet articulated through subtle action. On 127 occasions, Seven has observed the magnitude of the Captain’s “charm.” 

Perhaps Seven was the one to exhume Janeway from her uniform shell, a militant shuttle she packed her body into in favor of the Federation’s protocol. Perhaps she did not exhume Seven from her metal tomb. Whatever revelation that transpires becomes suppressed, hushed, repressed and locked away in Pandora’s prized box.

Akin to waiting out an ionic storm, she swallows all premises of anticipation. Adjacent to her bent, contorted body, Kathryn reaches for a replicated bottle – small and quaint, an appropriate size to adorn the palm of her hand. The curious scent of orchids infused with amber is familiar to Janeway with its Earthly combination as she works the lotion in. Their magnetic presence is far too close and in the grand paradox of things, not enough.

Afforded rare, raw intimacy threatens the vulnerability she aims to protect.

In swift retaliation, Seven puts a temporary end (a cease and desist) to Janeway’s wandering exploration. Her titanic grip seizes hold of a seemingly frail, pale wrist, freckled from age and the inheritance of genetics. Gradually, she slackens the pressure by swiping a thumb, encased in metal, over the grooves and ridges adorning Janeway’s palm. What curious impressions litter fundamentally human flesh.

“You need not concern yourself with my implants,” Seven begins and finds her jaw working overtime in contrast to the sharp stare that Janeway delivers. It’s not that she doesn’t wish to forget the journey, and how far she’s come, but it’s more so about the insecurities that womanhood presents.

My, how the Captain – now naught but a woman paying her respect to a moment so sacred – conducts herself with a devotion and a keen attention to detail. Her thumbs work in languid circles, teasing beyond the thin veil of flesh to loosen the pulsating muscle underneath. She massages those slender legs with deliberate care. Kathryn feels the flow of life itself despite the surge of nanoprobes, organic matter which she works in the fashion of a sculptor. Oh, how darling Da Vinci would be proud.

“This okay?” Janeway asks, looking up, looking to Seven.

“I appear to be operating within acceptable parameters. Resume your course of action, Ca–.” A fierce glare corrects the cadence of her speech. “– _Kathryn_.”

“Allow me to enjoy you and for you to enjoy yourself,” Kathryn rasps, planting a kiss to a knee that spurns a reflexive chain of reaction.

Pursed lips, with the residue of wine-colored lipstick, breeze across an extended, procured shin. She traces the twist and turn of her leg. A flurry of kisses halt at the top of Seven’s upper thigh where Kathryn promptly rests her chin, between the apex and the point of no return. Her once blue eyes dilute to a murky grey, hazy from lust, but full of considerable respect. From the frame of her lashes, she looks up, adoration relaxing the once stern mask she wears on board.

Mapping out the expanse of her pale body, committing to memory such exquisite beauty. She plants a delicate kiss upon Seven’s opposite knee to received another involuntary reaction. Seven, in turn, quirks a brow before craning her neck to look down at Kathryn, baffled yet curious towards her own bodily response. It’s merely biology, she knows, but the sensation dwelling within her chest is warm, unfamiliar. Not familial, not kindred. Simply adoring.

 _One hell of a Turing test,_ Janeway figures. 

The warm copper of her hair licks her cheek. Seven find that the boyish grin, flashed in her direction, resembles a phaser blast. Crushed by the weight of her beauty, her indifferent presence, Kathryn could kiss her and upon the revelation of such a prospect, Janeway denies herself that bittersweet yearning. Alas, hypocrites can never contain themselves.

How her legs glisten. Combined with that soothing scent, Janeway allows herself the comfort of resting her face upon the tops of firm thighs. It’s a light, ginger grazing of flesh against flesh, the consecration of sincere worship.

Gently, hands seize hold of her face to coax her from once burrowing into Seven’s lap. Metal infused into skin, far from the testament of a living sin, procure such a blissful harmony. In doing so, auburn locks cling to her cheek, plaster to the quirked corner of her mouth. How haggard Kathryn feels lessens a little. She lets her face be cradled and held by Seven.

Well beyond Captain Janeway’s influence, Seven – fair, inquisitive Annika – carries her own a formidable presence. Always, Seven finds new ways to surprise, delight, and even enrage Janeway. She offers a throaty chuckle. 

What tenderness they make in amicable seclusion.

After a particularly arduous sigh, Janeway removes herself from her knees to rise. One leg aches and so, the other follows, as she stands while leaning forward. Her hand clutches the top of the sofa to steady herself, her face so intimately close to Seven’s. Seven watches, observes, with such militant precision. Her eyes devour the appearance of her Captain, slightly flushed, despite the secular turtleneck gripping her throat and the four pips glaring over the indecency of being worn still.

Fondly, Kathryn traces her jawline before venturing (exploring) that smooth, pale canvas. Her thumb caresses below the ocular implant, nail flicking across the protrusion and indentation of scarification. Her nail traces cool metal warmed by flesh and blood.

Once more, Seven captures her wrist to lure her back-handed caress over her cheeks that glow. Akin to a painter directing the brush, Seven guides Janeway’s thumb across the pretty bow of her lips.

“You _are_ a vision,” Kathryn remarks, voice thick with a longing that consumes her, a passion that could so easily destroy her.

“On the contrary, I am revolving around your orbit, Kathryn, and you the vision, a Sun, that could burn me,” Seven counters, teeth grazing Janeway’s finger, eyes blazing.

This isn’t the myth of Icarus and Daedalus; they are far from familial and so, Janeway _has_ to laugh, getting closer still as she rests her weight atop Seven’s lap. She allows for Seven to remove her pips, one by one, to uncover the woman she’s buried. They hit the coffee table with a persistent plink, plink, plink, plink.

“I see you’ve been borrowing from my library,” Janeway quips, resting her forehead against Seven’s and enjoying the hand upon the curve of her back, the indentation of an exoskeleton riling the vestiges of her uniform.

Seven rakes her fingers – those unmarred by Borg technology – through Kathryn’s cropped hair. How it spills through her hand like blood, but remains silken to touch.

The subtle hint of a smile from Seven is enough to silence her to savor the moment between them. The convergence of their breathing matches the steady hum and thrum of Voyager, as they allow one another to hold and to simply be held.

**Author's Note:**

> I had commissioned the wonderful AnnaMcb24 (on ao3) for a visceral illustration of this fic and she has completely encapsulated this piece with her beautiful art. Here's the complementary piece: https://twitter.com/bbqchipdealer/status/1345564904351178752?s=20
> 
> Thank you again, my talented friend. c: I highly recommend commissioning her on Twitter over at @bbqchipdealer! <3


End file.
